


close your eyes and slip into the comforting embrace of—

by Wolvesandwerewolves



Series: death bed [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternative Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Use, Gen, Immortality, Mentions of Suicide, Pre-Canon, Temporary Character Death, death and the afterlife, drug overdose, graphic descriptions of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26097784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolvesandwerewolves/pseuds/Wolvesandwerewolves
Summary: He’s glad he learned this at twenty-five instead of fifteen. He does not want to know what his father would think of this side of his powers or how he would use it to his advantage.He’s much more keen to use it for himself, anyway.I still have not seen season two (i know, right? disgrace) and so this is only season one compliant :(
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Series: death bed [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1900552
Comments: 25
Kudos: 139





	close your eyes and slip into the comforting embrace of—

**Author's Note:**

> Sup guys, i was planning on writing and posting the next chapter to my klaus-has-schizophrenia-and-also-powers au and instead i wrote...uh this 
> 
> idk man I guess it’s kinda based off of one of my earlier ua works. holy carp my writing has improved so much. forcing myself to write something almost every day is good for me. I’m having so much fun and i hope you are too
> 
> Anyways yada yada yada, without further ado, here is my bullshit. have fun and be safe

The first time Klaus does it without the drugs, Ben is . . . surprisingly calm about it. 

It’s cold out. The last time he shot up was four whole days ago. Unwillingly, he’s sober. Painfully sober. He let his brother convince him to use the last of his money to buy a motel room, worried for the predicted storms and the ice already on the dead ground, and for Klaus’s roughly outdated boots and his ugly, worn socks.

His skin burns like the unending echo of the radio and ghosts, crawling inside him and itching. But only Ben is speaking to him, and the radio died hours earlier. He’s trembling, sick with sweat even in the chill of January, even with the old motel air conditioning rattling through the room like an old smoker’s cough. He’s huddled up under blankets, wearing a hoodie that’s rough against his skin and too big on his bones.

The last time he slept was also four days ago. 

Shadows blur at the edge of his vision, dark figures pretending to be something close to human. Every time he turns his head, they skitter away, maybe never even there. But the ghosts are. The dead surround his bed in a rough circle, silently staring at him and waiting. It’s unnerving, but inherently better than their screams, their incessant whispers and moans. 

_(He thinks, later, that maybe they could tell he was about to die, and that’s why they were so eerily quiet.)_

Klaus feels almost like he’s floating. His mind is thick and lethargic, he’s so, so _tired_. He feels almost high, thoughts scrambled in his brain like an egg. He thinks he had eggs, yesterday. Or maybe the day before. He’s not sure. He’s on a bad trip, but the road is sober and wavering. It twists like the insides of his stomach. Reality reflects sharply around him like broken stained glass, a sorry, demolished church at the end of the world. 

He hovers somewhere inside a dark purgatory crafted out of insomnia and dead fingers. He feels himself sinking, finally drowning in the cool, murky waters of sleep and bad dreams. 

And then, like a bright strike of lightning in a sudden storm, he’s not. 

Klaus sighs, sits up slowly and rubs his eyes with each fist. He’s not so exhausted anymore, but it feels as if he’d only fallen asleep a few seconds ago. Hate how that happens, really. 

He looks over to Ben, sitting at the chair across the bed from him, in the corner of the room huddled up next to the window. His feet rest on the coffee table, and there’s a book nestled in his lap. The newspapers setting out in front of him tremble from the air conditioner, but his hair is as unaffected as it always is. He’s dead. He’ll get used to it at some point. 

Klaus feels strangely hollow. Or maybe like he’s stuffed full of cotton, a prized piece of taxidermy hanging on the walls of his father’s office.

“I thought I was sober,” he says, and he’s almost surprised by how loud his voice is, how it doesn’t scratch at his throat. He remembers being thirsty, before he fell asleep.

Ben stops in the middle of a sentence. He glances up and blinks, like he’s surprised to see Klaus there, awake when he was reading him to sleep. 

“You are,” Ben says. He slowly closes the book, sets it on the table without taking his eyes off Klaus or even blinking. 

“Oh,” Klaus says. He glances away, slowly counting each ghost around his bed. He’s a rabbit in a lab, and everyone is wearing white coats, metaphorical and probably uncomfortable. Even Ben is studying him strangely. “I feel weird.”

“That’s because you’re dead.”

Klaus blinks. Ben nods, bluntly. He points, and Klaus follows the direction over his shoulder, twists halfway in bed and finds—himself. 

“Oh,” he says. 

Behind him, he’s wearing the same hoodie he is now. Does that sentence make sense? Does this image make sense? His face is pale, eyes closed, long eyelashes dark against his gentle, bruised sockets. The lines of his jaw are sharp, cheeks hollowed out with soft shadows. His dark, curly hair is hidden by the hood, but his bangs stick out limply, and he remembers his hair was uncomfortably damp with grease and shower water and no shampoo. He’s stiff, looks almost fake, like a figure in the wax museum he went to once, hand in hand with a man he can’t remember the face of anymore. 

He’s dead. 

“Yeah,” Ben says. “Oh.”

“Huh,” Klaus says. He turns back to face Ben. He’s wearing the same outfit he has worn since the day he died, jeans and a black hoodie underneath a leather jacket. He’d died in January, too. 

Klaus looks back down at himself, his own self this time, not his body. The sweatshirt he’s wearing is old and uncomfortable, strings taken out and never replaced. It’s light grey, with dark blue letters printed across the left area of his chest, _Shinyview Rehab Center,_ from his last stint there. He’s wearing black boxers, no pants, and no socks. His nails aren’t painted. It’s unimportant, because he’s dead, and a ghost now, but he wishes they were. The last time he was a ghost, they were painted black, and clenched tightly around a baggie of the pills he’d overdosed on. He wore a skirt, then.

“At least my outfit is better than yours,” he tells Ben. “I’m looking fabulous.”

Ben rolls his eyes, but he swings his feet off the edge of the table and stands. He sits cross legged on the bed next to Klaus, then reaches out and pokes him pointedly in the chest. Klaus pouts, rubs at the spot dramatically. He pokes Ben back. 

“Think it’ll stick?” Ben asks. 

Klaus shrugs. It feels different, somehow, from the other times he’s died. This time, there are no drugs to blame it on. Maybe he had a heart attack or something. He doesn’t remember his chest hurting.

Usually he feels as if he’s hanging by a thin spider’s thread, noose tied around his neck that leads back to himself. And before, when the water of the world rippled and his image vibrated with a psychedelic filter, the noose tightened and he woke up, gasping and alive against his will. Like he’d been pushed forcefully back into his own body. 

This time there is no noose, no swampy water soaking in his brain. He’s on dry land. 

“No idea,” he says. 

“What did you do?”

“I feel asleep,” Klaus says. 

Ben frowns at him. He sighs, flicks his gaze to Klaus’s body, still and sleeping without his spirit. 

“Okay,” he says. “Now what?”

Klaus shakes his head. He watches, idly, as a fly buzzes through the room, as it lands on his own forehead. He can’t feel it. He doesn’t remember it being there earlier. He wonders how it survived the cold of winter.

He doesn’t like that he’s alone, with only a single motel fly to find his dead body. No one knows that he is here. He has hardly spoken to his siblings in years. There is a _Do Not Disturb_ sign on the door, and his stay is up in three days.

He doesn’t want to sit and watch himself decompose. He doesn’t want to watch the fly buzz around his body. The walls of this motel are too close together, the room so small and suffocating even when he doesn’t need air. 

Klaus glances back to Ben. “Let’s go,” he says.

Ben nods silently and follows him as he passes through the walls and into the unfeeling night air outside. There’s snow falling, winking in the bright neon vacancy sign of the parking lot. Ice freezes against the glass windshields and windows of the few cars parked here. It’s probably cold out. Freezing.

Klaus doesn’t feel it at all. 

_________________________________

It lasts two days. It’s the longest he’s ever been dead before. 

In the end, it doesn’t feel so much as a noose tightening as it does a soft lullaby. Somehow, he’s restless, and instinctively he knows what he has to do. 

So they stop haunting the old walls of the awful place they’d grown up in, and Klaus leads Ben back to his own body. He says he feels weird again, but he doesn’t. Physically, he doesn’t feel anything. But somehow there is an open window in the attic of his brain, and the dust floating in the yellow, harrow light filtering through the orbits of his skull tell him what to do. 

When he wakes up, Ben is sitting on the bed next to him, reading the same passage he’d read to him in death. 

There is bruising all along every area he had laid in his bed. 

“It makes sense,” Ben tells him, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

Klaus doesn’t think anything makes sense. He’s standing at the sink of the motel bathroom, hair wrapped in a towel, one also around his waist. In the mirror, purple and brown emulsify beneath the skin of his back, long against his sharp spine. It stings, and the skin feels almost puffy when he presses a single finger against it. 

“You’ve been dead for two days. Your blood’s just been stagnant. That’s why you’re bruised,” Ben says, still talking even though he didn’t ask. 

Maybe he did ask. The sight is sickly. He wants to lie back down in his bed, go back to sleep even if he wakes outside himself again. 

“Are you okay?”

Klaus shrugs. He doesn’t want to answer, because he’s afraid that he isn’t okay, and he doesn’t want to admit it. 

He thinks, idly, how lucky he was to have left the air conditioning on in the middle of winter, and how that is another thing he does not want to think of. 

He doesn’t bother getting dressed. Even the towel hurts as it drags along his fevered skin. He turns, and instead of answering his brother, walks stiffly out of the bathroom. He flops on the bed, on top of the mess of blankets. He stays on his stomach, folds a pillow inside of his arms and rests his face on it. He closes his eyes and hopes this time he wakes up plainly, inside of his own body and alive.

He does.

———————————————————-

The next two times he dies are unexciting as always. It’s the burning of heroin in his blood, the flutter of his heart slowing or speeding in his chest, and the loud gasp of himself choking on a mouthful of vomit. 

Ben stays with him as always, complains about the drugs and makes fun of him when he wakes up, panting and sweaty. Somehow it’s not as comforting as it used to be. Death, even unintentional, is a chance to get away and breathe, (even if he can’t,) take a few quiet moments away from the physical plane. 

But he remembers how in control he felt the time he simply fell asleep, and how choking the noose is now when it draws him back to his body. 

He doesn’t tell Ben he wants to try again, but he thinks somehow Ben still knows. 

Klaus lies in the bunk bed of the rehab he’s checked himself into, idly playing with the ID bracelet on his wrist. It’s one am. There are two other men on bunks just like his, their quiet snoring filling the room. Ben sits at the foot of his bed, silently pretending to read. Klaus still catches every time his brother glances over at him, when he turns the page and lets his eyes wander. 

There are only two ghosts here. Klaus isn’t sure how they died, and he doesn’t want to know. He lets their words grate on the inside of his skull, annoying and wearisome. He’s sober, just like last time. Exhausted like the last time, too. 

He told Ben last night he couldn’t sleep because of the insomnia rehab and being sober always brings. But he thinks if he wanted to he could have. He didn’t want to. He thinks it might be easier to slip away when he’s bone-weary and washed out. 

He remembers the four days before his death, heavy with insomnia and slick with sweat, hot and burning with tired tears. He thinks of his foggy mind when it had happened, and the bruising all along his entire backside that took two months to fade, afterwards. 

Klaus thinks maybe this time he’ll let himself sleep before he gets to that point. 

He glances over at Ben once more, catches his eyes fluttering casually back to the pages of his book. He sighs, tries to concentrate on the sounds of his roommate’s quiet snoring, the rustling of pages and the soft whirring of the fan in the bathroom across the hall. He thinks of the way he felt the only time he died peacefully, in his sleep, and how . . . _independent_ it felt. 

Maybe if he can master it, he can stop overdosing—not that he does it on purpose, necessarily, but. But he just wants to feel like he’s in the driver’s seat of his own life, for once. It won’t make the ghosts disappear, not like drugs do, but it makes _him_ disappear, instead. The dead don’t seem quite so horrifying when he’s one of them.

Or maybe it’s just morbidly addicting in a gross, ghastly way and he’s an addict. He’s in rehab, after all. 

This is a different strain of high. 

So Klaus closes his eyes, and breathes slowly. Inhale four seconds, hold it two, exhale five. He gets into a sleepy rhythm, lets his thoughts drift, wandering around the listless intersections and creeping highways of his mind. The feeling of murky green, like swampy, warm water, in the skeleton face of death. The spidery noose around his neck; he imagines untangling it, cobwebs sticking to his fingers not there and breaking away. The hazy break of reality around him, shattered glass and bright, hypnotic rainbow reflections. Death, the cold scythe held in between skinny, childlike fingers, and grasping it in his own boney grip instead. 

He thinks he sees a girl, inside of his mind, young and laughing at him with childlike glee. She knows something he doesn’t. 

And then, he blinks and sits up slowly, mind falling back into place. 

“You did it,” Ben says. The book is folded in his lap, and he has his arms crossed. He’s leaning against the edge of one bunk post, staring at Klaus from beneath his hood.

_Of course he knew._

Klaus glances back, and there he is, pale and unmoving. He’s dead. 

“I guess so,” he says, turning back to his brother. “Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks, hmm?”

“You’re not old,” Ben says, but he’s smiling. 

Klaus grins back. He shifts and jumps down from his bunk. His feet make no noise when they land on the floor. His roommates snore on, sound asleep and entirely unaware that a man just died in his sleep right next to them. 

“This is going to turn into a habit, isn’t it?” Ben asks. 

Klaus laughs and lies to him. He leads him through the dark halls, and together they explore the quiet maze of the rehab center. He goes to the mirror in the bathroom and makes faces even though he doesn’t have a reflection in it. It’s far more fun than it should be. He’s _dead_.

The ghosts stare through him, daunting and somehow disappointed, silently moving out of their way as he and Ben walk past them in the empty halls. He is just another spirit, like them, now. He can’t help them, and they seem to know it. They are just as eerily, as blissfully silent as they were the first time he died like this. 

But this time, he goes back to his body quickly. He doesn’t want to be found out. He thinks of the dark bruises, how complicated it would be to have to explain everything away if he’s discovered. He thinks of his siblings, how awful Ben’s funeral was—and of his father, and the torture he went through as a child. 

He’s grown up, now. His father doesn’t deserve to know any single thing about him. Especially—especially not _this_.

This is for himself, and maybe Ben, and no one else. 

——————————————————————

It gets easier, after that night. Death always comes to him when he calls Her, creeping and obedient and eerily calm. Most of the time, he dies peacefully in his sleep, sober and wanting. 

A few times, he dies on the haze of smokey lungs and red eyes, powdered nose and colorful pills.

That tends to happen less and less as years go on, though. Slowly, the idea of being sober does not seem quite so terrifying.

Every time he dies, and every time he comes back, the ghosts seem a little more weary of him. Ben says something about him feels off, now. He wonders if other people notice it, too, or if it’s something only the dead can see. 

He has been sober for six months, and four days, dead for something like fifteen hours when he gets the news. Reginald Hargreeves is dead— _and so is he._

Klaus wakes up laughing.

He does not want to see his father in the afterlife. He wants to be alive to spit on his grave, condemn him for every awful second of his childhood and Ben’s childhood and maybe even Ben’s death. 

“What a shame,” he says, voice low and sarcastic as he stares at the bright blue screen of the tv, the reporter claiming that his father died in his sleep like he didn’t deserve. “I was hoping to solve a murder.”

Ben sighs. He’s sitting on the bed next to him, hood up, carefully concealing his expression. He wonders who hates Reginald more: him or his brother. Maybe another of his siblings.

Klaus grabs a cigarette from the nightstand, watches the wrinkled skin of his palm on his _Goodbye_ hand glow orange behind the lighter. 

“Are we going to the funeral?” Ben asks. His voice is quiet beneath the buzz of the tv. He sounds young. He is young. He died years ago. 

“Do you want to?” Klaus asks. 

Ben shrugs. He doesn’t answer.

Klaus sighs. He taps excess ash of the end of his cigarette. There’s a small pile of it on the night table, falling beneath the cracks of his broken ash tray. 

He is thirty-five, now. He’s grown up a lot. He’s no longer the scared, little boy, crying in the dark of a locked mausoleum, ghosts screaming and rushing through him. He has not set foot in a graveyard for years, or even walked passed one. The ghosts mostly leave him alone, these days. 

He has an apartment. He’s sober, on and off. And he has better control of his powers than he ever did when his father tried to force him. He’s learned more about himself and his abilities than he ever thought possible—it’s not just seeing ghosts. It’s becoming a ghost, and once or twice even possessing another body not his own. It’s hands glowing blue and ethereal and touching Ben when he’s breathing, letting Ben pick up a book he didn’t die holding. It’s life and death, give and take, like the rolling tides of the ocean he has only ever been to in his dreams. A nightly scythe, bones, and blinding sunlight, blood underneath his fingernails. 

Klaus wonders if his siblings have changed as much as he has, or if they’d be surprised to see him now. Luther’s been on the moon for at least a year, now, probably more. He thinks Diego is back fighting crime like he did as a child. Alison still stars in movies, but he’s heard from early morning talk shows that she’s divorced, now. And Vanya—well, she published a book spilling the secrets of their shitty childhood, and good for her. 

(He does not know where Five is, and will not think of it.)

He has Ben. An ugly apartment downtown, and even a job at the bar beneath his place. 

Klaus shrugs. “I guess we could,” he says, blowing smoke into the air and swirling it with a pointer finger. “Maybe borrow a few things from dear, old Dad’s office, redecorate the place. How does that sound, Benny?”

Ben crosses his arms and slouches down. “If you bring home one of Dad’s ugly taxidermy animals, I’m moving out.”

Klaus laughs. “I’ll just put up the giant portrait of him in the living room, then. Staring down at us silently—it’ll be just like old times, oh, how _nostalgic.”_

Ben groans. He laughs back. 

Tonight, he’ll kill himself, peacefully in his sleep, just to hug his brother. Maybe he’ll even punch him in the arm, for good measure, too.

**Author's Note:**

> cool goodnight i love you
> 
> I’ll try to upload a new chapter of I’m With You In Rockland tomorrow ok
> 
> xoxo nighty night
> 
> Edit: went back and fixed grammar mistakes, yikes there were a lot of them. also changed a few words :)
> 
> Edit again: if you guys keep being nice to me in the comments, i WILL start crying ok 🥺


End file.
